


Taste Them In My Teeth

by ishie



Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types
Genre: Community: trope_bingo, F/M, Genderswap, trope: forbidden fruit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-04
Updated: 2013-07-04
Packaged: 2017-12-17 15:20:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/869021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishie/pseuds/ishie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As Persephone faded, so too does Hannibal, for a time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Taste Them In My Teeth

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the "forbidden fruit" square for trope_bingo. Title from ["Man" by Neko Case](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unNa-9qGkfI) (♥). All my thanks to Damalur for kicking this into shape (♥♥).
> 
> The violence isn't too graphic but better safe than sorry. May also hit some body and/or pregnancy horror buttons, so caveat lector (har har!).

Over a lifetime, Hannibal has honed her senses to a keen edge. The knives she wields to prepare her meals are but an extension of herself, of the fine, supple weapon she has forged out of the raw material she once was. The wariness of the prey becomes the watchfulness of the predator, a role that suits her far better in this new life.

There is little that escapes her notice. Those few things that do tend to be minor. Inconsequential. She has been inconvenienced by them a time or two—forced to make hasty decisions that stop the breath in her lungs. She cannot afford to let anything pass her by, and so it does not, as a general rule.

But nothing has ever approached the magnitude of this—this _lapse_.

\---

The lethargy takes no great effort to explain away. She has not slept through the night in decades. It served her well enough in medical school and during residency. By the time she left the hospital, practice had become ritual and, when it is necessary, a glass of wine before bed helps to lull her into a chemical drowse. The rest of the time, a few moments of meditation over steeping tea or a quick sketch as the sun rises mimics the restorative peace of sleep that continues to elude her.

For a brief period every few years—when the days turn drear and grey, and icy winds do their best to find her through the cracks in thick walls—Hannibal feels as though she will drown in her weariness. 

Then those few hours each night are no longer sufficient to carry her through the day. She grows pale and thin. Brittle, even to a stranger's eye. Onionskin stretches tight over the bones of her face and hands, trembling over the dusky blue of her veins, and deep shadows ring her eyes.

She retreats to a rented house on the Chesapeake. With its slabs of brutal concrete and near-seamless glass, it squats on the shore and calls no memories forth from inconvenient quarters. Within, she cocoons in thick blankets and sleeps away entire days at a stretch, emerging only to gorge herself enough to keep her body alive until the spell passes. She eats mindlessly, consuming whatever falls into her basket on soon-forgotten forays into the bland, faceless supermarket that sprawls beside a highway. 

She eats nothing she produced. Nothing she created. It all tastes like stale air, like desolation, the tang of preservatives burning holes in her tongue.

This time, it comes on more suddenly than it had in the past, but it does not linger as it did in her darkest days. And when it has gone, she feels hazy and unreal. The fault, she is sure, of the packaged food whose wrappers she is careful to gather together and burn on the beach. She has not been reduced to their chemical artificiality for a long time, she reminds herself. It will be weeks before she feels free of their taint.

\---

Hannibal returns to her home in Baltimore, a few pounds heavier, perhaps, but none the worse for wear. To celebrate, she treats herself to a succulent take on _coq au vin_ , with her usual twists. The tender flesh gleams in the golden glow of her dining room, but her stomach rebels against the richness of the dish after so many days of relative paucity, and against many other dishes in the following days.

This is also easily explained. Her body often reacts this way upon her return. As Persephone faded in the light when she was cast out of the underworld, so too does Hannibal Lecter, for a time. Whether it is in penance or punishment, though, Hannibal has found she is not willing to say. To do so would invite too much careful scrutiny of aspects of her life she far prefers to keep at a remove, even from herself.

So, when this too passes, Hannibal finds her appetite restored with such vigor that it surprises even her, though she wonders at it not at all. Instead, she revels in the meals that she creates with her own hands. The beauty of the light flashing on her knives. The unctuous slide of supple flesh. The heat of the flame against her skin. The little sounds of pleasure from her guests as they share in her bounteous table.

She is ravenous.

"Please," she entreats those faces gleaming in the candlelight, their hungry eyes and mouths dark and gaping. "Enjoy."

She brings her glass to her nose and inhales deeply. Oak and juniper, a hint of lemon. She longs to savor the flavors bursting upon her tongue, but her stomach gives a lurch when the first drop of alcohol slides down her throat.

Across the table, Dr Manuel leans forward, a slight trace of sauce still darkening his lower lip. His breath has a tang of the metallic, a hint of the ulcer that may kill him much faster than he deserves. 

"Simply delectable," he tells her. The hungry look that follows gives little hint as to whether he means the boeuf bourguignon, or her. "Too bad you won't teach my wife how to do this. She could burn boiling water." 

His wife shifts uncomfortably at his side as the other guests titter. The heavy curve of her abdomen slides against the tablecloth. The doctor's hand lands heavily on her forearm to hold her in place when she reaches for her wineglass.

Hannibal watches it all with a careful expression and slight dip of her chin. When the last guest has gone, the hair on her arms rises as though a chill has swept through the room, and she _knows_. Everything she resisted for weeks. Every signal that she has made an error so momentous there may be no escape. She sees clearly—lets herself see—the conclusion that is so obvious even Jack Crawford could not miss it. 

How could she have _allowed_ this? Allowed the impulse of a moment to override most every instinct she possesses, driven near to a frenzy as she was with the need to consume without destroying, for the first time. 

Worse still, how could she not?

\---

Will peers at the swell of her abdomen even before she begins dressing to acknowledge it. He thinks he hides it well but the weight of his gaze drags at her. His eyes are dark and soft, all his unexpressed longing so close to the surface that she can feel it against her skin, oily and damp.

"I, uh, I didn't realize you were seeing anyone." 

_Dear Will, still tied to his solidly working-class notions of family and procreation._ From anyone else, Hannibal would be repulsed by the world of assumptions bundled into those words. But she remembers the way his curls dampened against his neck and his face—that wonderfully expressive face—twisted with pleasure, both at her touch and from the chemically-induced sensations bombarding him. His taste lingered in her mouth for weeks.

"I am not."

"Oh." Will summons his glasses from the depths of his bulky coat—the disguise he has not felt compelled to wear in weeks. After fiddling with them for a moment, he slides them back into a pocket and tries to smile, baring all his teeth. "Well, congratulations are in order, I suppose."

Hannibal allows herself a genuine smile and thanks him with pleasure. She cannot find it within herself to begrudge him the impulse to distance himself from her pregnancy, though he does not remember his part in its existence.

\---

He must never remember.

\---

There is no formal announcement. Hannibal has no family to gather close in anticipation of the happy news. She has no need of gifts or glad tidings, no girlfriends from whom she will seek sympathy or encouragement. Jack knows almost as soon as Will does; Alana brings a bottle of wine, and pours them each a small glass.

"I see that perhaps I have been a terrible influence," Hannibal says. The wine is crisp and bright, from a small local winery that earns steady accolades even among the most discerning oenophiles. She has come a long way from her days of spritzers and screw-tops.

"What was it you used to say?" Alana says with a laugh. "What the medical board doesn't know won't hurt them?"

"Indeed."

There are a thousand questions Alana longs to ask. Hannibal can read each of them in the careful way she sits and tilts her head. But the one she chooses is a surprise.

"Have you told Abigail?"

Hannibal has not, but she will. She looks forward to seeing the surprise on the girl's face, to hearing her blunt questions—the questions it seems unlikely anyone else will ask. _Isn't she too old? Why now? Who is the father?_

_What will this mean for Abigail?_

This is the question Alana truly wants to ask as well, Hannibal knows. She has made no secret of her unease with Hannibal's treatment of the girl, nor with Will's attachment to them both.

She could reassure Alana as she plans to do with the girl. Seek her counsel, perhaps, or even offer to withdraw from further treatment. What she intends for Abigail has little to do with facilitating her recovery as anyone else would recognize it, after all.

Instead, she shakes her head and finishes her wine. The girl is hers, still. For a while longer.

\---

The evening air is humid and dense as Hannibal steps down from the curb and slides into the back of the dark sedan.

In the passenger seat, Will makes a soft noise and scrubs his hands across his eyes like a child. "Can't we..." he begins.

"All right, keep your pants on." Beverly Katz's hand twitches toward him on the steering wheel but her attention does not otherwise waver from the road ahead as she pulls into traffic.

"Jack wanted me to say he's sorry to bring you out so late," she says, offering the apology by proxy as though it has nothing to do with her. Her dark hair is swept up in a neat ponytail and the scent of talc lingers in the air. 

In the rear-view mirror, her eyes are dark and wary. Though they have crossed paths many times in the past few months, that look never fades.

"It is no trouble," Hannibal assures her. Though it is warmer still inside the car, she pulls her light coat tighter around her. "I do not sleep well as it is."

"Yeah, my mom got like that with all of us—" 

Will makes another noise and sits forward, made as uncomfortable by this oblique mention of Hannibal's pregnancy as he has been at every stage. His fingers beat a nervous tattoo on the door beside him. Dr Katz looks over at him, looking equal parts confused and irritated. 

His agitation is palpable. Hannibal tastes it at the back of her throat, a thick warmth that lingers.

She cannot resist the impulse to save him. "I am made to understand that the victim may have self-immolated...," she says, letting her voice trail off so that he will feel compelled to finish her thought. 

The car grows warmer still as they roar down the highway, Will's words a counterpoint to the sound of the tires on blacktop. His hair falls against the collar of his coat. From this angle, Hannibal can see the sharp jut of his jaw where it curves up into his ear. He has lost more weight, weight he could ill afford to lose to begin with. 

She longs to feed him. To stuff him full. Bring him into her kitchen once more, to share in the delights of her table as he once did and watch as the hollows under his skin disappear. He is a lean man—slight, one might say—but she would see him as plump as a Christmas goose, fat marbling beneath his pale skin. 

Just the thought makes her jaw ache. The urge to devour him lurks below every moment she is near him. To sink her teeth into the soft skin of his neck, his cheek. The tenderest parts are always the sweetest.

The child moves within her, as though keyed to her hunger. Hannibal pushes aside her coat enough to glide her fingers over her own swollen skin, cradled there in the cozy dark.

 _Soon_ , she promises, as Will paints a picture of boundless rage and impulse, the hiss of his voice bouncing off the windows. 

_Very soon_.

\---

Dr Manuel leaves a note for his wife and newborn child. The pressures are too much, he admits, and the life he thought he'd wanted has become a prison. He seeks his paradise elsewhere, the note hints but does not say.

"That is what you sought," Hannibal says, when his eyes roll wildly in his head and he strains away from the razor she trails along his bicep. "Is it not? Pleasure you no longer found in the familiar?"

If he could speak, the good doctor might whimper or plead. Instead he makes noises like an animal robbed of breath.

"It is what you did to your first wife as well. Do I recall that correctly, Gerard? That quiet woman who put you through school. Did she not give you a daughter as well?"

His blood runs quick and hot over his paling flesh. He is thinner now than he was when they first met, the puddle of fat that clung to his waist long gone. They are almost perfect counterpoints; she rounded where he is angular. She is breathing and vital, pinkened by exertion and sweating lightly in the close air. He grows chalky and grey, sliding inexorably into the cold.

\---

"A terrible cliche, forgive me, but you positively glow, Dr Lecter," Jack says. "And this stew! I'm not familiar with it; is it an old family recipe?"

"An old friend, rather."

"Delicious, either way."

He seems pleased—happy, even—for the first time in months. Hannibal wonders if he has finally found a refuge from worry and care to replace the haven that had once been his marriage. She thinks not. He is a singular man in at least that one respect, so full of devotion for his wife that it seeps from his pores and stains the air around him. 

She is glad. Though the added distraction of an affair would certainly keep his attention from straying toward her, it would be a monstrous refutation of his vows. She cannot pretend affection for him; no more than what she lets him see, at any rate. But she would be disappointed, nevertheless.

There are so few certainties in life. She thinks Jack Crawford should remain one of them.

\---

Hannibal wakes one morning from a dream of being devoured, slowly and carefully, from the inside. Teeth rending her flesh to ribbons from breastbone to pelvis as something new struggles to emerge, her own fingers reaching deep within to pull it free. She could almost be disappointed in such a textbook vision, as common to millennia of women as the looseness in her joints and the marks where her skin has been strained past its stretching point.

But she is comforted by it rather than repulsed. It is not so far off the mark, in the end. Her body is designed to divert resources to the life growing inside her with no regard for her own well-being. If she is not careful, the child will steal the calcium from her teeth, from her bones, leaving her brittle and broken as it grows ever stronger.

It is nothing more than she expected. She knew she would teach this child everything she knows, has thought that perhaps she has already begun fashioning her own end. That the child is ready to begin before it is even born is...

Heartening.


End file.
